Guest Post: 100 years later, the madness of daylight saving time endures

Michael Downing, Tufts University

One hundred years after Congress passed the first daylight saving legislation, lawmakers in Florida this week passed the “Sunshine Protection Act,” which will make daylight saving a year-round reality in the Sunshine State.

If approved by the federal government, this will effectively move Florida’s residents one time zone to the east, aligning cities from Jacksonville to Miami with Nova Scotia rather than New York and Washington, D.C.

The cost of rescheduling international and interstate business and commerce hasn’t been calculated. Instead, relying on the same overly optimistic math that led the original proponents of daylight saving to predict vast energy savings, crisper farm products harvested before the morning dew dried and lessened eye strain for industrial workers, Florida legislators are lauding the benefits of putting “more sunshine in our lives.”

It’s absurd – and fitting – that a century later, opponents and supporters of daylight saving are still not sure exactly what it does. Despite its name, daylight saving has never saved anyone anything. But it has proven to be a fantastically effective retail spending plan.

Making the trains run on time

For centuries people set their clocks and watches by looking up at the sun and estimating, which yielded wildly dissimilar results between (and often within) cities and towns.

To railroad companies around the world, that wasn’t acceptable. They needed synchronized, predictable station times for arrivals and departures, so they proposed splitting up the globe into 24 time zones.

In 1883, the economic clout of the railroads allowed them to replace sun time with standard time with no legislative assistance and little public opposition. The clocks were calm for almost 30 years, apart from an annual debate in the British Parliament over whether to pass a Daylight Saving Act. While proponents argued that shoving clocks ahead during summer months would reduce energy consumption and encourage outdoor recreation, the opposition won out.

Then, in 1916, Germany suddenly adopted the British idea in hopes of conserving energy for its war effort. Within a year, Great Britain followed suit. And despite fanatical opposition from the farm lobby, so would the United States.

From patriotic duty to moneymaking scheme

A law requiring Americans to lose an hour was confounding enough. But Congress also tacked on the legal mandate for the four continental time zones. The patriotic rationale for daylight saving went like this: Shifting one hour of available light from the very early morning (when most Americans were asleep) would reduce the demand for domestic electrical power used to illuminate homes in the evening, which would spare more energy for the war effort.

Unfortunately, there’s not an unlimited amount of daylight that we can squeeze out of our clocks.
igorstevanovic/Shutterstock.com

On March 19, 1918, Woodrow Wilson signed the Calder Act requiring Americans to set their clocks to standard time; less than two weeks later, on March 31, they would be required to abandon standard time and push their clocks ahead by an hour for the nation’s first experiment with daylight saving.

It didn’t go smoothly. In 1918, Easter Sunday fell on March 31, which led to a lot of latecomers to church services. Enraged rural and evangelical opponents thereafter blamed daylight saving for subverting sun time, or “God’s time.” Newspapers were deluged by letter writers complaining that daylight saving upset astronomical data and made almanacs useless, prevented Americans from enjoying the freshest early morning air, and even browned out lawns unaccustomed to so much daylight.

Within a year, daylight saving was repealed. But like most weeds, the practice thrived by neglect.

In 1920, New York and dozens of other cities adopted their own metropolitan daylight saving policies. The Chamber of Commerce spurred along this movement on behalf of department store owners, who had noticed that later sunset times encouraged people to stop and shop on their way home from work.

By 1965, 18 states observed daylight saving six months a year; some cities and towns in 18 other states observed daylight saving for four, five or six months a year; and 12 states stuck to standard time.

This wasn’t exactly ideal. A 35-mile bus trip from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, West Virginia, passed through seven distinct local time zones. The U.S. Naval Observatory dubbed the world’s greatest superpower “the world’s worst timekeeper.”

So, in 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, which mandated six months of standard time and six of daylight saving.

Great for golf – but what about everyone else?

Why do we still do it?

Today we know that changing the clocks does influence our behavior. For example, later sunset times have dramatically increased participation in afterschool sports programs and attendance at professional sports events. In 1920, The Washington Post reported that golf ball sales in 1918 – the first year of daylight saving – increased by 20 percent.

And when Congress extended daylight saving from six to seven months in 1986, the golf industry estimated that extra month was worth as much as US$400 million in additional equipment sales and green fees. To this day, the Nielsen ratings for even the most popular television shows decline precipitously when we spring forward, because we go outside to enjoy the sunlight.

But the promised energy savings – the presenting rationale for the policy – have never materialized.

In fact, the best studies we have prove that Americans use more domestic electricity when they practice daylight saving. Moreover, when we turn off the TV and go to the park or the mall in the evening sunlight, Americans don’t walk. We get in our cars and drive. Daylight saving actually increases gasoline consumption, and it’s a fallacious substitute for genuine energy conservation policy.

Lawmakers in Florida, of all places, ought to know that year-round daylight saving is not such a bright idea – especially in December and January, when most residents of the Sunshine State won’t see sunrise until about 8 a.m.

On Jan. 8, 1974, Richard Nixon forced Floridians and the entire nation into a year-round daylight saving – a vain attempt to stave off an energy crisis and lessen the impact of an OPEC oil embargo.

But before the end of the first month of daylight saving that January, eight children died in traffic accidents in Florida, and a spokesperson for Florida’s education department attributed six of those deaths directly to children going to school in darkness.

Lesson learned? Apparently not.

Michael Downing, Lecturer in Creative Writing, Tufts University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

From the Archives: GOP congresswoman headlines youthful same-sex marriage event on Capitol Hill

GOP congresswoman headlines youthful same-sex marriage event on Capitol Hill
July 11, 2012 8:18 PM MST

Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry is a new organization that was launched at a reception on July 10 at the Capitol Hill Club, the social club for Republican party members and activists mere blocks from the U.S. Capitol, Supreme Court Building, and Library of Congress.

The featured speaker at the reception was Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida), who as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is one of the highest-ranking women and Hispanics in Congress. (Ros-Lehtinen immigrated to the United States from Cuba.)

Calling the gathering of just over 100 people a “great celebration,” Ros-Lehtinen used her brief remarks to outline the shared values of Republicans and conservatives.

‘Core principles’
“This new initiative,” she said, “helps highlight the role of young conservatives and Republicans from around the country who agree on this issue and many others. We are all here because we believe in the same core principles.”

Those principles, she continued, include limited government.

“We believe that the best way that the federal government can help in spurring economic growth, which we so badly need in this country, is to get out of the way and let the small and medium businesses thrive.”

Another shared principle is, she said, “the equality of opportunity that’s available for each and every one of us, no matter where we come from, no matter our circumstances.”

She emphasized a third principle, “that the individual and the family are the central engines in our society. The right of individuals to lead their lives without government intrusion is a bedrock Republican, conservative value.”

More than sex
That central principle, Ros-Lehtinen said, “is more than just about sexual orientation.”

It is, she explained, “about the fundamental rights that we all share as Americans. It’s bad enough that we have to deal with the overregulation of our economy. No one should have to deal with government red tape when it comes to committing themselves to those whom they love.”

After her remarks, in an informal press gaggle that included the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner, the twelve-term congresswoman pointed out that an organization like Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry represents “a generational shift.”

The question of whether to expand marriage equality in the United States, she predicted, is “a problem that many years down the road, we’ll look back upon this time and say, ‘This was a problem? This was an issue? This was a ballot initiative?’”

‘New image for Republicans’
Ros-Lehtinen, who is seeking re-election this year in Florida's 18th congressional district, said that “things are moving in the right direction thanks to the young people who are making a difference. To harness this energy on this issue,” she said, “is very important” because it presents “a whole new image for Republicans and we’ve got to win the minds and hearts of the next generation.”

From her perspective, she explained, “things are changing slowly -- too slowly for me, but you’ve got to be working the issues at the local level in order to get to the very top.”

She pointed out that the reception was being held in the Capitol Hill Club, a traditional Republican gathering place, yet “everybody’s here and there’s no problem. Maybe even only 20 years ago, this would have created a ruckus.” (Indeed, the room where the reception was held had a portrait of the late Senator Jesse Helms, an ardent opponent of gay rights, hanging on the wall.)

Young Conservatives for the Freedom to Marry, she said, “is organic. It’s from the bottom up. It’s going to change attitudes.”

Pressed by a reporter as to whether she is a supporter of gay marriage, Ros-Lehtinen said firmly, “I am” and then repeated, as if for more emphasis, “No, I am.”


Publisher's note: This article is part of a series to mark June as Gay Pride Month. It was originally published on Examiner.com on July 11, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Masticating Thespian

It was one of those obituaries that make you say to yourself, "He died? I didn't know he was still alive."

In this case, it was this morning's report that former Florida Senator George A. Smathers had passed away at the age of 93.

I first heard the name of George Smathers when I was a high-school sophomore. My debate coach, James M. Copeland, used as an illustration a famous speech that Smathers gave on the stump when he was campaigning against incumbent Senator Claude "Red" Pepper, his onetime mentor, in the 1950 Democratic primary. (In those days in Florida, as in Virginia and other Southern states, the only election that mattered was the Democratic primary.)

Mr. Copeland taught us how Smathers had bamboozled some of his less-literate constituents by using fancy-sounding words that implied worse meanings than they actually held.

Smathers, I should add, denied having made the speech throughout his life, even offering a $10,000 reward to anyone who could prove it had been delivered.

In its issue of April 17, 1950, Time magazine reported Smathers' words as follows:

Smathers was capable of going to any length in campaigning, but he indignantly denied that he had gone as far as a story printed in northern newspapers. The story wouldn't die, nonetheless, and it deserved not to. According to the yarn, Smathers had a little speech for cracker voters, who were presumed not to know what the words meant except that they must be something bad. The speech went like this: "Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper before his marriage habitually practiced celibacy."

Had Smathers actually given this speech, he would have been practicing a form of the literary technique known as paranomasia, defined as

a play on words or ideas. This term is from the Greek and is a combination of a preposition and a noun, the former primarily meaning beside; the latter indicating to name or to give a name to. Laying aside the rigidity of the etymology of the term, we would say that paronomasia consists of our laying down beside one word or idea that has been used-- a similar one with a little variation or change. The point or force of the word or idea thus employed is contingent upon our understanding of the word or idea upon which it is a pun.

In this case, of course, the point is contingent on the audience's misunderstanding of "the word or idea upon which it is a pun."

Regardless of whether Smathers actually delivered his famous speech, it became a well-known component of political and rhetorical lore. It is even featured on the web site of the Claude Pepper Foundation. In 1970, Mad magazine published a revised and extended version of Smathers speech, which itself has sometimes come to be attributed to Smathers. (According to my research, the parody speech was written by Bill Garvin.)

Garvin's version includes some hilarious passages and demonstrate much more completely the principles of paranomasia. For example:

Let us take a very quick look at that childhood: It is a known fact that, on a number of occasions, he emulated older boys at a certain playground. It is also known that his parents not only permitted him to masticate in their presence, but even urged him to do so.

But wait, there's more:

The men in the family are likewise completely amenable to moral suasion.

My opponent's uncle was a flagrant heterosexual.

His sister, who has always been obsessed by sects, once worked as a proselyte outside a church.

His father was secretly chagrined at least a dozen times by matters of a pecuniary nature.

His youngest brother wrote an essay extolling the virtues of being a homo sapien.

His great-aunt expired from a degenerative disease.

His nephew subscribes to a phonographic magazine.

His wife was a thespian before their marriage and even performed the act in front of paying customers.

And his own mother had to resign from a women's organization in her later years because she was an admitted sexagenarian.

Garvin's take on Smathers' anti-Pepper speech has been republished in numerous places.

Pepper, it should be noted, did not let Smathers end his own political career. He tried for a Senate comeback in 1958 and, failing that, ran for the House of Representatives in 1962, winning election and serving until 1989. "Red" Pepper, whom Smathers had accused of holding pro-Stalinist sympathies, was succeeded in Congress by Cuban-born Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who is now the ranking minority member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Hat-tip to Tim Hulsey for the reference to paranomasia.